Is Gen Z Too Dumb to Be Cops?

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Why recruits arrive less prepared, and why the fix is harder standards.

Field training officers and command staff are describing the same recruit across agencies: reads slowly and with poor complex comprehension, writes reports that don’t survive a defense attorney, loses focus on sustained tasks, and freezes when a problem has no obvious answer. The perception is accurate. The deficits are measurable. But the cause is not that this generation is less intelligent, and treating it that way pushes agencies toward the worst available decision, which is lowering standards to fill seats. The recruits coming through today are trainable. They arrive developed differently, mostly through conditions they didn’t create, and the correct response is to raise the bar and build the training that clears it.

The perception is real, so stop arguing with your FTOs

The first mistake is telling experienced trainers they’re imagining it. They aren’t. The skills showing up thin are specific and nameable: reading comprehension, written communication under time pressure, sustained attention, independent problem-solving, and the resilience to keep working a problem past the first point of friction. Those aren’t soft complaints. They’re the exact competencies a report, a warrant affidavit, and fluidly managing a call all demand.

What the data actually says, and what it doesn’t

For most of the 20th century, measured intelligence rose generation over generation in developed countries. That trend, the Flynn effect, has reversed. The strongest evidence comes from Norwegian military conscription data: scores peaked for the 1975 birth cohort and have declined since, roughly a fifth of an IQ point per year (Bratsberg and Rogeberg, PNAS, 2018). The same reversal shows up in conscription and testing data across Finland, Denmark, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Australia, all beginning in the mid-1990s.

Literacy tracks the same way. U.S. adult literacy scores fell about 12 points between the 2017 and 2023 rounds of the federal PIAAC assessment, and the share of adults scoring at the lowest proficiency level climbed nine points (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023).

Here’s the part that matters for how you respond. The Norwegian study compared brothers. Later-born brothers, same parents and same gene pool, scored lower than their older siblings. That within-family result rules out a genetic explanation and points squarely at environment. The decline is real, it’s measured, and it’s not a defect in the people. It’s a product of the conditions they grew up and were educated in, which means it can be trained back.

The cause is developmental, not defective

Three things happened at once, and none of them is about intelligence.

Education shifted toward the test. Accountability regimes rewarded schools for scores, so instruction drifted toward recall over reasoning. For instance, an entire generation learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell without learning what that means or how to reason their way to it.

Technology took over the reps. Earlier tools reduced physical labor. Modern tools reduce cognitive labor. Navigation, memory, arithmetic, and now first-draft writing and judgment through AI, all of it can be offloaded to a device. Skills that used to develop by daily necessity simply don’t get practiced. As the training truism goes, unused capacity atrophies.

And learned helplessness set in. The concept comes from Martin Seligman’s work in the late 1960s: when someone becomes convinced they can’t do a thing before they’ve tried, they stop trying and shut down. A recruit who has never had to solve a problem without a phone often assumes he can’t, then quits at the first friction. From the outside that looks identical to incompetence. It responds to training in a completely different way, because the deficit is belief and unpracticed skill, not capacity.

Why policing feels it before other fields

Policing runs on the exact skills modern life stopped building. Reading and writing under time pressure, against statute. Decisions made under stress with constitutional, legal, and life consequences. Problem-solving with no app, no script, and no supervisor at your elbow. A profession could hardly be designed to expose these particular deficits more efficiently.

The problem compounds because the seasoning layer thinned at the same time. Retirements and resignations pulled experienced FTOs and mentors out of the pipeline. The apprenticeship that used to convert a raw recruit into a competent officer now runs with fewer skilled hands, right when recruits need more of them.

Rural and small agencies take the worst of the training side, not the headcount side. As of early 2025, the Police Executive Research Forum’s staffing survey showed small and medium agencies had climbed back to or past their 2020 numbers while big cities still ran below theirs, and that gap has narrowed since. Before anyone reads a recovered headcount as good news, it’s worth asking why those seats filled: because the work got more attractive, or because a tight budget and a thin applicant pool quietly lowered what it took to get hired. This paper can’t settle that, and the field hasn’t studied it closely enough to say. Every chief can still hold the question up to his own hiring: is our staffing more sustainable than the big departments because we’re doing something right, or because we took who we could get? The disadvantage that isn’t in question is training capacity. No budget to send an officer away for a week, thin benches, solo patrol, no veteran to spare for mentorship. That’s a training-and-development problem, and it’s the one worth solving.

Lowering the bar is the worst option on the table

The pressure to lower standards is real and documented. In the 2024 IACP survey of 1,158 agencies, more than 70% said recruiting is harder than it was five years ago, agencies reported running at 91% of authorized staffing, and 65% had cut services or eliminated units, up from 25% in 2019. Miami PD took 809 applications across a recent year, a number it once hit in a single day a decade ago. Under that strain, agencies are dropping standards to put bodies in cars.

That’s the wrong lever, and not for cosmetic reasons. Dropping the bar confirms the recruit’s own belief that he can’t clear it. It strips out the friction that actually builds competence. Worst of all, it puts under-developed officers on the street, where the deficit resurfaces as bad reports, avoidable uses of force, and washouts that cost more than the seat ever saved.

One fact is worth holding against the whole “lost generation” narrative. Gen Z trust in police rose from 27% to 43% between 2023 and 2024 (reporting via Governing, 2024). The people are still willing to sign up. What’s missing is development, not raw material.

Meeting them where they are, then raising the bar

Standards and development only look opposed if you assume the recruit is a finished product. He isn’t. You raise the standard and build the training that gets him there, starting from where he actually is, which is usually through no fault of his own.

Baseline honestly. Assess the real starting point in reading, reasoning, and decision-making under stress. Not to screen people out, but to know what you’re building on. You can’t develop a gap you refuse to measure.

Train in reps, with controlled failure. Competence comes from repetition against rising difficulty, with after-action that doesn’t protect egos. This is the deliberate version of adding friction back into a life that engineered it out. TF70’s scenario-based blocks are built for exactly this: high repetition, honest debrief, difficulty that climbs.

Point their tool fluency somewhere useful. These recruits arrive already fluent in the systems, which is an asset once you aim it. Teach them to write the narrative themselves first, then use an AI tool to check and tighten what they wrote, so it amplifies a skill they’ve built instead of standing in for one they haven’t. Gate it behind demonstrated competence. Give the force multiplier to the officer who can already articulate a stop or a use of force on his own. For the one who can’t, it’s a crutch that buries the gap until it surfaces on the street, in a report that doesn’t survive a defense attorney. Accountability for a constitutional mission stays with the officer, never the software.

Give teaching judgment a structure. Recruits who haven’t developed instinct can be taught through a framework instead. TF70’s Critical Task Taxonomy gives trainers a repeatable structure for teaching constitutional decision-making under stress, so the decision doesn’t ride on experience they haven’t earned yet.

Rebuild the mentorship layer retirements stripped out. The Patrol Trainers Course develops the FTOs and trainers that agencies lost, which is the multiplier that makes everything else stick. TF70 has trained 52 trainers across 21 agencies since January 2026.

Flip the helplessness deliberately. Confidence that holds up on the street comes from demonstrated competence, not encouragement. Reps until “I can’t” becomes “I can work the problem.” That’s the legitimate-confidence model TF70 builds on: mindset, fitness, knowledge, and skills, developed in that order and under load.

The necessity

The recruits you can get are trainable. The failure would be to read a developmental deficit as a permanent one and lower the bar to hide it. Harder standards, matched with deliberate development that meets recruits where they start, are how you turn the people available to you into the officers a community can actually trust. That’s most true where the margin is thinnest, in the small and rural agencies that can least afford to field an officer who isn’t ready.

Sources

• Bratsberg, B. and Rogeberg, O. (2018). Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), 2023 results.

• International Association of Chiefs of Police (2024). State of Recruitment and Retention survey (1,158 responding agencies).

• Police Executive Research Forum (January 2025). National staffing survey.

• Seligman, M. and Maier, S. (1967). Foundational work on learned helplessness.

• Governing (2024). Reporting on police recruitment trends and Gen Z attitudes toward policing.

About the Author

John Chapman, known widely as Chappy, is a law enforcement professional with over 34 years of experience in operational, leadership, doctrinal development, applications engineering, and training roles. He is a published author and has specialized in the development and delivery of patrol and tactical law enforcement curriculums for over 28 years. Chappy is the Executive Director of the Task Force 70 Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on training, mentoring, and educating underserved rural and small-town law enforcement officers and agencies across the United States. Information and contact info can be found at TF70.org.

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